17.1. Benefits of Prepared Statements

MySQL Server supports prepared statements, which are useful when you want to run several queries that differ only in very small details. For example, you can prepare a statement, and then execute it multiple times, each time with different data values.

Besides offering a convenience, prepared statements also provide enhanced performance because the complete statement is parsed only once by the server. When the parse is complete, the server and client may make use of a new protocol that requires fewer data conversions (and usually makes for less traffic between the server and client) than when sending each statement individually.